Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Cinematics: Essential or Extravagant?

The directing is so important...yet in BG3 I think it is MEDIOCRE at best. It looks pretty good, and there is just so much of it...just the dynamics/movements/camera angles are off. TONS of wtf moments.
I prefer the Witcher 3 directing IN GENERAL.

Personally I enjoy them a lot as lot of them are really well done and portray properly what they're supposed to portray. However disregarding the cutscenes which look like they were made by a freshly hired intern who just learned how to animate, the one thing that ruins the cutscene experience drastically for me are the cartoony player facial expressions which are so overdone that they end up looking comically bad.

An example where a character is neutral for 99% of the cutscene and then suddenly has evil thoughts;


Sad, confused, angry, evil... there's really no subtlety to facial expressions because Larian is trying so hard to portray raw emotions that instead it ends up ruining the cutscenes because either a character ends up looking like a confused stumbling dumbass or looking like as if they're trying to do a Doctor Evil impression from Austin Powers. "Oh, in this cutscene player gets to exhibit evil thoughts. QUICK! DO THE EVIL FACE!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

I honestly miss the days of Early Access when there were no facial expressions, it looked so much better and made the character look like an adventuring professional who is in control of their emotions.

So if Larian would just make the facial expressions drastically more subtle and improve numerous animation transition & smoothness errors that some cutscenes are displaying, then it'd be perfect. Because I know they can do it, a lot of cutscenes are wonderfully animated to perfection (such as the MIndflayer transformations or Dame Aylin's flight), but the regular dialogue cutscenes where NPC's eyes go crosseyed or they turn/snap awkwardly as if a noob animator made them or display these hideous facial expressions... those need fixing badly.

None of the advocates of BG3 cinematics have come up with an example of one which exemplifies why cinematics are great or one which the content demonstrates the power of cinematics.

Then we have the pretence that there are no fetch quests in Bg3 and, again without examples, that the maps in BG3 are somehow better than the average game.



What if I don't want to feel like I'm in a movie? Whatever that means. What if I want to feel like I'm playing a cRPG? What if I don't want to sit there listening to a piece of spoken dialogue which would take me 2 or 3 seconds to read.

You’re not entitled to other people justifying their video game preferences to you.


Then you (obviously) go play a different game. You’re not entitled to every CRPG being tailor made for you.

You’re welcome.

Should that be read as criticism? The obvious explanation is that the OP did not ask for examples. That said, Icelyn gave the example of petting Scratch, and Crimsonrider mentioned the flight of Dame Aylin and the mindflayer transformations. I'm sure that if someone would ask for examples, plenty could be supplied.

Petting Scratch is a good example, I think. There is no dialogue. It just shows you being happy (admittedly with a too stupid grin, but that is a side issue) petting the dog, and the dog with his faithful dog eyes being happy being petted. Now contrast that with a console displaying "You pet the dog."

For me a good example of why cinematics are great is bringing characters to life. For that, you really need to see their faces up close. Jaheira, for example, is a much more developed character (to me) in BG III, just because I can see how she acts and talks. That's decidely different from reading text next to a small portrait.

People are entirely entitled to like or dislike whatever they wish but if one is to claim that something is 'good' or 'bad' then surely it is incumbent on them to give a reason, even if that reason is 'IMO'.

I didn't like DoS" but I don't think it was a 'bad' game - just not what I am looking for in a cRPG.

I'm assuming that the "You’re welcome" is some sort of inane Americanism. If so the meaning is lost on me.





I don't know the mindflayer one but I could see that as being a good and obvious use of a cinematic. But petting a dog and wannabe Wonder Woman flying in the sky (which does nothing for story or plot BTW), come on.



Fair enough, that works for you but it doesn't for me and to be fair, Jaheira is probably not a good example to use as we know what her take is going to be precisely because she is Jahiera. For me the words dictate the way a character will act and talk so once I've read the words I pretty much know what to expect next.

Come on, folks. Let’s turn down the heat.

So true. I never played BG1 & 2, but I knew who she was through some lore stuff. So the moment I saw Jaheira in BG3 she immediately captivated me, her entrance to the story was pretty grandiose and sets her up as an incredibly experienced warrior that's been through a lot. To me her whole introductory cutscene did her a favor, especially with Karlach fangirling so hard

This simply makes the whole scene more lively and believable.

But of course the game still has to be broad and deep and long. I wouldn't like to play more like an adventure game and have lots of cutscenes, but not a good RPG with depth and mechanics and good class implementation.


As long as the game doesn't feel too much like a tunnel, it's all good.


Imagine it the other way around. You would basically just read a text bar when you speak to NPCs.

That would speed up the game a lot and simply limit it to a few dialogs. The rest would then be less and less noticeable on the second, third and subsequent runs.

The result would be a powering through.

The focus would definitely shift to a different way of playing.

Now I have more of a feeling of immersion.

Without conversations, an essential part of the presentation and depth would be lost.

The depth could and would have to be compensated for by an even deeper world. Then, for example, the Underrealm Part 1 would have to be the standard in scope for every simple dungeon and every dungeon in order to be credible here and to sell a mysterious world.

So the scope would be huge on another level, but would it be well filled and not empty at the end?


But it would be all the more difficult in terms of presentation.

The presentation of a game is heavily based on such images and a cinematic story.

Blizzard has always been quite good at that.

Blizz has always done a good job with the cutscenes. I remember D2 after every act. That had a lot of impact.

If you do away with that on a grand scale, then you have to somehow convey that from within the game itself and I don't think it's any less effort.
But it could also work if you let it run directly in the game itself without a cutscene. If this is done well, it would even be a win.
Best as a combination of both.
But these scenes would have to be very well done and believable from within the game itself.
I don't think it's that easy and it shouldn't be too monotonous.

And yet, this is what ultimately may happen. As argued, I think Larian had figured the same after completing BG3 too -- what with content being cut and the reactivity in Act 3 going down. Else, their next project may turn out to be like Cyberpunk 2077 (initial release state) -- and the games from CD Projekt aren't even as open as BG3, both inside of quests (which are completely linear in Witcher 3 anyways) as well as branching. There's so many individual dialogue cinematics in BG3 that you're never going to see simply by your choice in character, dialogue, NPCs still alive (or dead) -- or simply because a roll of a dice.

https://www.pcgamer.com/were-runnin...-lead-quest-designer-on-big-budget-rpgs/



Maybe there will be technology that makes this easier in the future to still retain. Otherwise, the standards set even by older games will be harder and harder to retain, let alone trump. As it takes longer and longer (and more money) to marry cutting edge animations increasing in complexity with every new gen of hardware with a game spreading its wings and genuinelly branching out.

Just having text to read has been the case for decades and resulted in some of the most memorable RPGs on the market like Planescape Torment, Disco Elysium, Fallout 2, Baldurs Gate 2 or Mask of the Betrayer, all of which are far superior to BG3 in many aspects, especially the important story and writing ones.

The way my brain works, the constant cinematics and voicing becomes overwhelming to me after a while and I can't play for over an hour at a time. On the other hand, I have a very visual imagination and I absolutely love being able to read and imagine things for myself, so I'm in the minority I'm sure.


Agreed. Good writing is the most important element if you want a story/game to be memorable over time. We have yet to see if BG3 will have the same longevity over time, once the hype dies down and people are looking for the next thing that has the newest graphics. If you look at say, BG2, it still has a very passionate fanbase (including myself) and people are still making substantive mods for it all these years later. The graphics don't give the game a soul, the writing does.

Another thing occured to me, and that is the divide between cinematics and gameplay, which sometimes feel greater in BG3 than in anything cinematic wholesale.

Playing the game exclusively from behind the shoulder cam may remove this feeling some, but it's as if BG3 exists in two distinct modes: Actual gameplay (exploration and combat) vs cinematics (most else). There's even often quite of a break when you approach a key scene, your character suddenly stops moving and you realize, yupp, the game is going into cinematics mode now. And then the cinematic starts.

Of course, this is nothing new. Cinematics in their very concept are fundamentally opposed to gameplay, which is interactive, whereas cinematics are computer graphics cinema. Dialogue choices are here of course, but as long as there's a cinematic, gameplay basically comes to a halt. As argued, really really curious how people are going to view cinematic games in 30, 40, 50 years from now.

I think that if they aren't seen similar to very early movies, then games by then haven't realized their near full potential yet. That doesn't mean games would need to remove dialogue etc. or anything wholesale, but by then should come up with solutions better suited and wholly unique to games -- as interactive experience going places where no movie could ever go. You see promising glimpses of that in old Origin/Looking Glass games for sure (alongside to Arkane, their modern-day "heir"), but nobody's much evolved beyond that yet and completely ran with it. As going cinematic is also quite unrisky (people LOVE cinema), and costs are still rising, this might take another plenty years.

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Cinematics: Essential or Extravagant?

This is a tough question because the answer is in the middle. While using a strict definition of the word essential along with the concept of gaming then the obvious answer is that it is NOT essential. However if you look at the concept of a RPG in totality then the Cinematics play a real role. A great RPG is about the lore and story, a well done and placed cinematic can help with this narrative and immersion.

As for it being extravagant, well that is ask in how it is applied. A lot of games I have seen take and add cinematics to make a game seem longer than it is, at least it feels that way. Sometimes things get a bit out of hand, like in BG3 the constant cuts of petting the dog or the Owlbear cub. Cute for sure and the first time maybe setting a mood but at some point it is just silly.

I do not thing an RPG is made or broke of Cinematics, but I do think there is a place for them. However an RPG can obviously over due making their impact less meaningful

Oh. Well, here goes. I like them. That should suffice, I think. It's entertainment, it entertains me.

Fair enough, some nuance, then.
I've come rather accustomed to them, too. Mass Effect, Witcher, Fallout 4... Even Baldur's Gate 1&2 had them, although much more limited of course, due to technical and budgetary restraints. I really enjoy actually seeing my character in a character-driven game, it's something that adds a lot to the experience for me.

I recently gave WOTR another go, and I noticed how I really didn't want to read an enitre novel about the Angels and the Demons in dialogue mode. That sort of stuff should be in books for me to read when I feel like it - not in the middle of the action.

Having said all this, I'm not too big on all the tadpoling scenes, especially in the first act. That becomes such a drag, much more so on replays. I wish there was some way to just suppress that tadpole and be done with it.